Lightroom: Keywords don't sync between CC and Classic

Keywords do not sync correctly: When added on the mobile app (iOS), they do not appear in LR classic and not in LR Web (I deleted the new LR CC immediately, this version does not make sense to me). Same problem into the other direction: Keywords from LR classic do not appear on the mobile app. Attention: At this stage the whole keywording within the iOS app should not be used!

John and Johan, looks like you have insider information. Ok, then the whole keyword sync is useless. Shame on Adobe Software Engineering :-)
I am an Engineer by myself and know how difficult such a sync mechanismn is. Let us hope the best that they change their minds and implement it later.

This thread is quite confusing. Is there an Adobe document someplace that explains this in all its permutations?

However, this may explain why some of my keyworded images from LR Classic show Keywords in LR/CC and some do not. And, that explanation - according to this thread - is that some of my synced images have metadata written back to the image file and some don't - which is entirely possible.

I just took one of my CR2 RAW files which did not show any keywords in LR/CC and saved the metadata to an XMP file in LR Classic. Indeed, the keywords did not appear in LR/CC desktop or LR Web. However, an DNG image with saved metadata does show Keywords in both LR/CC Desktop and LR/CC Web but changes made to keywords in classic do not migrate to the cloud.

I think I need another computer to help me understand this logic which is quite inconsistent. Given Adobe's justification of no folders being "why should you care what folder something is in as long as you can find it:" - I'm surprised that they would give us a situation where you have to know the underlying file type in order to know how the system will work. I'm hoping that is a bug and not a design feature.

It is disappointing to learn that keyword syncing with Lightroom Mobile only works with the less feature-rich Lightroom CC and not with Lightroom Classic CC. I hope Adobe reconsiders and adds that functionality to Classic. It should've been added at introduction of Mobile.

I have wasted many hours keywording images on Lightroom CC, only to find that they haven't synced back to Lightroom Classic CC. I was excited about Lightroom CC, as I thought it would be really useful for when I'm out on the road I would be able to do all my processing on my laptop, then sync everything back to my main editing machine when I got home. It sort of half works, which is disappointing.

> you can enter keywords for smart previews in LR CC. LR CC knows these are originating from Lightroom Classic!

That would certainly be a good way of distinguishing them, although I imagine some people would still try to add keywords to originals added directly to the mobile apps and wonder why the keywords aren't appearing in Classic.

If I were a photographer that makes money off his photos then I would
have sent an invoice for the time wasted on keywording in LR CC!

My Syncomatic plugin could recover some of that wasted time. Using LRCC, they could export copies of the images they were misled into keywording in Mobile or LRCC, then use the plugin in Lightroom "Classic" to sync the keywords from these temporary copies to the originals.

I sincerely wish I didn't have to suggest this workaround, and wish Adobe had put effort into implementing a proper mobile keywording solution.

The features I'd miss from moving over to Lightroom CC full time are mainly around import and export:

Applying import preset

Applying metadata presets

Creating a second copy

Push collections

Export presets

KEYWORDING

That's before I get onto how much it would cost to have my whole archive in the cloud!

My way of working is that when I am on the road, I want to get my images processed, keyworded and uploaded as soon as possible. Then when I get back to base, I want them added into my main catalog.

When Lightroom CC was announced I was one of the few photographers who felt positive towards it - I thought I would be able to do away with my clunky workflow of creating and importing new catalogs each trip. However Adobe were ever so slightly off target - what could have been really helpful turns out to be not much use at all.

On my laptop I've got both CC to access the important pictures from my archive and Classic CC, to use my clunky workflow for new images.

I fully agree with Kaffeesegler. I have been using Lightroom since LR1 and I am really fond of this software. Lightroom CC seems to me a huge step forward and I try to use it on my laptop for more than 2 months. However key-words are a serious issue. Compared to Lightroom Classic Lightroom CC handles key words very poorly and above all sync between LR Classic and LR CC doesn't really work for key words. For me this is a huge drawback and prevents me tu use LR CC efficiently on my laptop. I hope that Adobe will change his mind and reconsider key words in LR CC.

This is certainly a disappointing limitation. But what's especially disappointing is that it's entirely unexpected (since all other fields are synchronized), and there's no communication in the product that this field won't be synchronized.

At minimum, I'd recommend adding a warning to the user the first time they try to edit keywords on a collection synchronized with Lightroom Classic; that would avoid a lot of frustration and confusion as users attempt to troubleshoot why keywords aren't synchronizing (even though everything else is).

I agree that it's a huge omission, and I want to see it rectified, but while they look like strings in the UI, I believe the internal implementation is much more complex (in order to support hierarchies and global keyword renaming, etc.).

For me one of the most valuable cloud integrations would be synchronized keywords between the Lightroom Classic CC infrastructure and Lightroom CC - because I like to use my tablet at home on the garden deck or sofa to surf the web and then, when I feel like it, I would like to use it to add keywords to images that still didn't get any. So I am forced to sit in a stuffy edge of my workspace which I have set up to have little outside light (so that I get the benefit of correct image display on my main screen) and work on those tags. It really should have been there years ago.

Oh, and I would like to be able to search through my synchronized collections in Lightroom CC - I sometimes do in promptu presentations of some of my images, I would really like to be able to get all my images of say a specific butterfly to show the best of them to someone who asked - currently I have to remember in which collection and approximately where in that collection I may have one of these images.

The lack of these keyword functions currently is one of the biggest omissions in the whole of the Adobe Cloud...

Hallo Karl Günter, the missing keyword sync from LR Classic to LR Mobile is one issue, but a much bigger issue is that you cannot search existing keywords when there is no internet connection. Imagine you sit in a beer garden and want to show pictures and it is not possible. Or sitting in the airplane and want to search a picture, again, not possible. OK, the new advanced autodetect scenes need internet, but there are still normal keywords and descriptions. In addition of that, the preview of pictures has issues in offline mode as well. You see only a black preview for many pictures. As son the internet connection is back all these black previews appear immediately. LR Mobile is no longer usable in such situations. OK, Adobe is adding more an more features and I love to see that, but I need the offline functionality as well.Let us hope the bestPeter

@Peter: It may be worth creating a new feature request for offline search to cover that scenario. There is another post regarding search capabilities, but it doesn't seem specific to the offline scenario.

I too naively assumed that Keywords entered in Lightroom on my iPad would sync back to theClassic version on my Mac. Having done so for many hundreds of photos on my last trip I now find I have to do the work all over again. Frankly the split of Lightroom into various iterations is confusing and not helped by Adobe failing to make the limitation clear in anything easily accessible to the normal user.

You haven’t been naive assuming the keywords should sync. Everything editable in LR should sync. And there isn’t even a warning text box!
There is absolutely no excuse for such a huge bug.
The “technical” explanations consisting of keywords type is totall bullshit.

Please, Adobe, implement keyword sync between Classic and Mobile: this is a critical feature for searching and selecting images in Mobile. Sensei search is great, but it cannot cover abstract keywords that describe all sorts of non-visual aspects in images.

Michel, I totally understand the legal obligations. But I'm not convinced a roadmap cannot be communicated for those reasons. Many camera manufacturers, for example, communicate on their lens roadmap. How is that different? Why could a software company nota roadmap?

Karl, as there is no other explanation as "this is technically impossible" or "this is by design"; don't blame us for speculation about reason behind those explanations.

Furthermore, maybe the number of replies to this thread will change the "answered" status of this thread.

Antoine,The general roadmap is disclosed in official statements that everybody can read and comment. My quote about "a train possibly hiding another"means that legal obligations may be handy to hide marketing preferences or decisions...I agree with Karl Günter that it would be better to discuss the matter in another discussion. However, your question is not only why Adobe does not communicate better, it's about the future of the CC and Classic versions and a critical issue in the present stage: sharing keywords.To be blunt, Adobe is not hiding anything. They are ready to change direction depending on many factors, including the ability of their teams to solve the keywords aspect. The roadmap probably has several options. Nobody will comment about this prematurely, especially in this technical forum.

If we stay on the keywords topic, I am very interested even though I don't user either LR version (only Elements) for my personal needs, Adobe gives me the suscription only to help Elements users to compare and choose the best solution. Today, there is no possible direct connection between Elements and Photoshop CC. You need to convert catalogs via the Classic version. You can't sync your catalogs, you can't use PSE as an external editor. The 1TB subscription offer for CC would seem interesting, but syncing and organizing features of the organizer are missing.

What is striking is that the current version of the organizer already offers user friendly and advanced features both in text search or visual recognition. You can create a visual multicriteria search combining keywords, people, places, albums, substrings in captions and much more. Just like a Google search. And its new smart tagging to search by any work like 'tree', 'automn', 'guitar'... those are features people are expecting to be still faster within a Cloud service than locally in a 'consumer grade' app like PSE.

My personal opinion is that the final course followed by Adobe will highly depend on the ability to solve the technical keywords syncing issues discussed here. They may have a 'Plan B'.

I investigated writing a plugin that would sync keywords from LR CC back to LR Classic. Unfortunately, the Creative SDK (Software Development Kit) provides access to all the other metadata fields -- title, caption, capture date, flag, and rating -- but, inexplicably, not keywords!

I don't think it is on purpose, but what's obvious is that cloud/sync integreation on the working LR (aka classic) is still in beta stage and won't evolve anymore. Just the bare minimum to show "no, classic is not discontinued". Even though it seems to be... Buisiness decision. And it is understandable that the integration of new technologies (AI, sync, cloud, ...) in a dynosaure (LR classic...) is quite difficult without rewriting everything...

--> So why not rewrite everything and ensure the users are more trapped whitin the system in order secure recurrent revenues? This all makes sense and is understandable!

However, the new LR is also still in beta, does not respond the photographer's need (it's designed as a mobile app) and is obviously designed to secure the recurrent revenue, BEFORE delivering a decent software.If the new LR were a great software, integrating all the working concepts of classic, whit additional features of sync, AI, web integration and all this... why not ? But it's not! It has too many flaws and omissions.

Now LR is divided in two, unfinished softwares:1) Classic, which I belive a lot of people will still be using because it corresponds best to the photographer's need, which is SLOW and on which the sync integration is POOR (/bad/horrible).

2) The newly written LR which is not finished yet, which does not respond to the photographer's need and which first goal seems to be to 'trap' the user's in the 'cloud' ecosystem in order to make it as difficult as possible to switch to another software.

@Karl, I'm not trying to divert the attention... I'm trying to find a rational explanation for the many issues LR is suffering from, starting from this one. This topic has been created 11 months ago, is maybe one with the most "me toos" or at least the most dabated one, and is parked as "answered".

I'd love you to prove me wrong, really... but except trying to understand WHY Adobe behaves like this, I have no other idea for being helpfull as reporting bugs and stating my -personal- observations of the evolutions (or lack of, in certain cases).

Maybe other poeple will read this and think the same, mabe not. Maybe Adobe will read this and react, mabe not. At least I do my part: report the bugs and try to give the devs the tools the LR we are -in the end- paying for. Just saying...

I agree with you all, not synchronizing keywords between LR CC mobile and LR Classic neglects in my humble opinion the very core functionality of LR. I am not a happy customer right now.

My LR (classic) library contains now every single photo I shot in the last 40+ years. For me there will never be a reason to transfer this huge amount of data into the cloud simply because I don’t need to access it very often.

But for actual projects saving the photos in the cloud and having access to the them from a variety of devices is an important feature. With Apples new iPad Pro it would be possible to travel light, which is getting more important every day.

But please ADOBE make it possible, that added keywords are synchronized to LR classic afterwards. I do know that the keyword architecture is different between LR Classic and LR CC. I would even understand if it would be difficult to synchronize the keywords from LR Classic to LR CC. But the other way round must be possible!

Please make it at least possible to synchronize keywords from LR CC (mobile) to LR Classic! This would be at least a step into the right direction.

And just to let you know: apart from these two mentioned functions I am a very happy customer for many years now.

With just a few hours of engineering, Adobe could enable plugins to sync keywords. (Of course, it would be better if Adobe built that in, but so far they've said explicitly they won't be adding new features to sync between LR Classic and CC.)